Eugene's pinball scene hits jackpot

Friday

In a couple of firsts, the city will host the sixth state championship, and five of its 24 competitors will be from the local area

Twenty-four contestants are coming to Eugene for the first time later this month to vie to become Oregon's champion pinball wizard.

And, in another first, five of those contestants will hail from Lane County's metropolitan area.

It's all a major coup for local pinball enthusiasts who have been working to establish an identity separate from Portland, the nation's pinball mecca and home of the first five state championships. In 2017, Willamette Week determined the Rose City is home to 722 pinball machines, more than any other U.S. city.

"It's gratifying because it's a lot of work on our end, but we know that people really enjoy what we're doing," said Matt Walton, co-founder of Emerald City Pinball and one of the five local qualifiers.

The catalyst was Walton and Mira Mason-Reader, the other co-founder, forming the league in 2017. It's sanctioned by the International Flipper Pinball Association, which works to build exposure to pinball as a legitimate competitive sport. The couple, who both grew up playing pinball with their parents, moved to Eugene after living a year in Ireland.

The league now organizes two seasons a year, one in the winter and the other in the fall, with up to 45 people competing, Walton said. It provided the structure and needed competition to enable local players to qualify for the state championship more easily.

"It’s a huge task for any city outside of Portland to compete for those prestigious state championship spots in Oregon," said Josh Sharpe, IFPA's president. "Eugene deserves all the credit in the world for growing the player and event base to mark its own star on the Oregon pinball map."

The state championship will be held at Blairally Vintage Arcade in the Whiteaker neighborhood starting at 10 a.m. on Jan. 19.

The championship is a single-elimination tournament where during each round two players compete to be the first to win four games based on high score. The top eight qualifiers receive a first-round bye.

"I feel like any of the people who qualify could win it if they have a good day," said Eugene resident Hayden Harker, another local qualifier. "I'm also kind of nervous. "

Even before the league's formation, the local pinball scene had been gaining some momentum in recent years.

It used to be the only outlet for competitive players was a weekly tournament at Blairally, where about a dozen players regularly competed for cash. Blairally and Level Up Arcade, located at 12th Avenue and Oak Street, are Eugene's two chief pinball hubs.

In 2011, Harker, a math instructor at the University of Oregon who has played pinball seriously for about 20 years, started the Northwest Oh-Pin, a major tournament that draws dozens of competitive players to the city.

Then, around the same time, both Level Up and Blairally opened within months of each other.

Owner Chad Boutin started the arcade, which features a bar and restaurant, after the digital revolution undermined the profitability of his commercial photography business. A friend had put some arcade games in the studio's lobby and the venture took off.

The arcade has about 30 pinball machines, which are rotated out to make way for others that Blairally finds and repairs. It also has numerous old-school arcade games such as Ms. Pac-Man and Centipede.

"We're committed to vintage preservation of arcade games. We seek them out on purpose. We find them half-destroyed and we rebuild them and make them fresh again," said manager Chief Lambert, noting Blairally is "super excited" to host the state championship.

Level Up owner Josh Docherty said he's seen many players show up to practice for upcoming tournaments. The arcade has about 25 pinball machines.

"They'll come in and be like, 'Oh, we want to get good at this machine,'" he said.

Docherty worked on computers for Apple and the University of Oregon before turning a hobby of fixing pinball and arcade machines into a business opportunity.

He enjoys how arcades, decades after their heyday, still have the ability to bring people of all ages and backgrounds together.

Harker said the league helped pull Eugene's pinball community together as players had typically stayed at their preferred arcade and rarely ventured to the other one.

"It was the league that got each group going to the other place," he said. "I think that helped build the overall community ... and make it a more cohesive community and a bigger one."

Pinball has gotten bigger in recent years after being left for dead after the arcades died out and with advances in gaming at home on both consoles and personal computers. The IFPA reported there were nearly 4,500 competitions and more than 55,000 players in 2017, compared to 500 players in 50 competitions worldwide more than a decade earlier.

Well-known actor Jack Black, who's apparently making a foray into video-game streaming, made a recent trip to the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas. The three-minute YouTube video of his visit released last Friday has been watched more than 4.5 million times.

Pinball offers a counterpoint of bringing people together and socializing in an era of esports and online, ultra-high-definition video games where competitors can be hundreds of miles apart, Walton said. And Mason-Reader said pinball's popularity in Oregon makes sense as its known for its hipster culture and pairs nicely with another popular state activity: drinking beer.

In addition to the state title and $3,000 in prize money, the two dozen contestants will compete for a shot to qualify for the North American Pinball Championship to be held in Las Vegas later this year. The reigning state champion, 16-year old Colin Urban of Portland, is currently ranked 52nd in the world.

Besides Harker and Walton, the other local qualifiers are Darren Dorman, Brandon Rangel and Andy Stubbs.

Rangel works around pinball as an employee for Amusement Unlimited, a distributor that sells and leases arcade games, but didn't get serious about the game until more than a year ago. He won the 2017 NW Oh-Pin, the first pinball tournament he'd entered.

Rangel said Walton was "pretty insistent" that he join the league, and he qualified for the tournament late last month after several more strong showings.

Having the tournament in Eugene, and competing on the same machines local players use regularly, definitely gives local qualifiers a home-court advantage, Rangel said.

"The more you get used to your hometown machines, the easier it is it anticipate some ... of the more mechanically dependent elements of the game," he said.

And he say's he's excited about being considered among the state's elite pinball players and getting the opportunity to play against them for a state title.

"Personally, I don't feel I'm particularly good at pinball, but the results beg to differ," he said.

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